POETRY

POETRY

HOME THOUGHTS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Lake Michigan reached beyond the horizon

like a sea in the pale September haze.

I watched the silvery waters stretching

towards Canada’s vastnesses, Greenland’s ice,

the North Atlantic, the Irish Sea.

A long dead Chinook salmon nudged the pier,

it scales barely glinting in the morning light.

On Michigan Avenue a parade

of Mexican social clubs passed by,

the air dense with bullhorns and mariarchi bands.

In the Art Institute of Chicago

I stood before Caillebotte’s large canvas

‘Rue De Paris: Temps De Pluie’ with its

dark clothed bourgeois couple – the man

moustached, holding a black umbrella,

the woman pretty, her arm in his. They are

looking across the rain filled street at something

we cannot see. And I thought of the print –

quarto sized we mounted and framed – that hangs

by the garden door in the hall. The couple

look forever at the door’s bright glass.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

PACIFIC BATHOS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

We are going to observe the California

Sea Lions – those celebrated aquatic

mammals – at Pier 39, Fishermen’s Wharf,

San Francisco. We walk from the Handlery

to Union Square then board the street car

at 3rd & Kearny and descend, past

the Dragon Gate in Chinatown, left

at the Ferry Building and so to the Pier –

a place of family entertainment, with

a floating restaurant and two tier

carousel. On the marina’s wooden pontoons

families of sea lions bask. To our surprise

they smell like a freshly opened and

very large tin of anchovy fillets preserved

in brine. To our further surprise nobody

else seems to have noticed, or to care.

 

***

 

Out of the fretwork shadow of the Bay Bridge

dominating the office window,

away from Kaspar Gutman and Wilma Cook,

from Iva Archer and Ruth Wonderly,

away from the cable cars’ ratchet and clang,

the horns in the distant bay, down a side street,

out of the fog, and into the grilled meat

fug of gossip, the Lucky Strikes

and waiters’ bustling hustle at John’s Grill,

Sam Spade orders chops, baked potato

and sliced tomatoes – in two dimensions,

always black and white, ten point or ten foot high,

celluloid or paper, like the city

always friable and combustible!

 

***

 

From the stretch of water between the

Maritime Museum and Alcatraz,

brown pelicans rise like tawny galleons.

 

 

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POETRY

THE JOYSTERS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.2K views

For Sylvia Selzer

 

So many ways to paradise or nowhere!
Not thirty five feet from our holiday let,
sitting on a county council bench
overlooking the sea – where the container ships,
waiting to cross the sand-bar, turn with the tides –
sitting in the hearing of terns and curlews
are a different pair each day
of female Jehovah’s Witnesses.
You baptise and christen them ‘The Joysters’.

They set up a collapsible stand –
next to a black municipal refuse bin –
for flimsy leaflets, and advertising
an online bible course. Their witness time
is spent under a black umbrella, chatting
to each other, ignoring passing sinners
on their way to walk the Coastal Path
to St Patrick’s Church at Llanbadrig,
or paddle-board and kayak on the briny.

There seem as many ways to row to heaven
or hell as there are birds of the air and the sea –
each journey with its own arcane charts,
its especially beatified isles,
its superior monsters of the deep.

 

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POETRY

ON THE TRAMP

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

In October sun on one of the benches

beside our local War Memorial,

directly opposite the new Co-op,

in mid-morning, an unknown man and woman,

dressed for outdoors and bulkily like folk

wearing many layers, are leaning together

in sleep like children, or marionettes.

Road traffic slows, pedestrians stare –

at adults kipping in seemingly clean clothes,

with brightly coloured backpacks by their sides,

before noon in a public, suburban space.

The sandstone cenotaph has last November’s

plastic poppy wreaths weathering at its base,

and among the names some still missing.

A bitter place to rest!

 

 

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POETRY

FAITH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

Today there are at least two of the so-called

great religions of the world represented

on the beach. ‘By their raiment shall ye know them!’,

or some such: a troop of evangelical

Christians in genderless red tee-shirts;

two family groups of Hasidic Jews

in head scarves, dresses, kippahs, prayer shawls

as required. An adolescent girl passes

in a shalmar kameez, which makes the tally

three. Poised with a net by the rock pools

is a young man in a yellow turban. Four!

A quartet of elderly women

in saris stands at the edge of the sea.

They might be Hindus – or Sikhs, or Muslims,

or Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists, or Jainists,

Taoists, Zoroastrians, Humanists!

What creative creatures we humans are –

or what a jokey shape-shifter God is!

 

Pleasure beaches like city squares are

unsafeguarded places where complete strangers

mix haphazardly close to, far off, as chance

dictates. This strand must be ranked as safe

by minority ethnicities

and people of colour. No one seems

circumspect or aggressive. Is the

seeming vileness of this kingdom, the

hateful and contemptuous claims of

divisiveness virtual not actual?

Is this the Big Lie of facile pundits

and celebrity snake oil politicians?

Is the peaceful joy of this ordinary

summer’s afternoon illusory?

 

As the wind-breaks begin to be rolled up,

chairs snapped shut, towels shaken the crows arrive

monstering aside the black headed gulls

whose environment this properly is.

They take whatever chancy pickings they can,

haram or kosher.

 

 

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POETRY

CONSUMERISM

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

From the open air car park adjacent to

the first floor of one of the largest

department stores in Western Europe –

whose customers are car owning folk

with some disposable cash to spare –

I can see the methane being burnt off

at the oil refineries, and, beyond,

a bundle of wind turbines turning

on the flood plain beside the estuary.

 

On the opposite side of the busy road

from the store is the second largest

retail park in England. At its centre

a gleaming big wheel turns attracting

and distracting families of shoppers,

who have commuted from across the region –

north east on the motorways from the old

Cotton Mill Towns, south east from the Potteries.

The car I am sitting in was made here

in this town built for the refineries,

motor vehicles, and canals – with narrow boats

carting bags of coal and fetching finished goods.

 

In the furnishing department of this store

there is a new range: William Morris Towels.

Morris – iconic textile designer,

socialist activist, artist, poet,

author of ‘The Glittering Plain’ and ‘News

From Nowhere’ urged: ‘Have nothing in your house

that you do not know to be useful,

or believe to be beautiful’. Yesterday

it would not have been safe to ask about

the towels – and tomorrow it might be

unsettling again – but today

we may be comfortable in our knowledge

of where they were made, and how, and who made them.

 

 

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